Chapter 20 - Capture the History of Your Amazing Journey
DIGITAL COMPANION
To read:
Warren Buffett: The ‘Sage of Omaha’ personally writes all his shareholder letters. Reading through a few of these since 1977 is enlightening.
The global peacemaker: In his years of globetrotting before dying in an airplane crash in Zambia, Dag Hammerskjold wrote down his negotiations with himself and with God.
On journaling: Gaining access to your own insight isn’t difficult; you simply need to commit to reflecting on a daily basis, explains McGill University’s Nancy J. Adler in this essay for the Harvard Business Review.
Chapter 20
Capture the History of Your Amazing Journey
“Never measure the height of a mountain until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was.”
— UN Secretary-General Dag Hammerskjöld, in Markings
As we near the end of our word journey together among the final chapters of this book, I include the quotation above from the late, great Swedish diplomat Dag Hammerskjöld for three reasons: First, it’s an inspiring message, one that all entrepreneurs should reflect upon in the inevitable somber moments of their own journeys. Two, it’s an opportunity to make the larger case for reflection itself that comes from Hammerskjöld’s personal journal Markings, discovered and published in a half dozen languages after his death in a 1963 plane crash. The journal is a remarkable testament to the importance of reflection by leaders, and I include links to the original and several commentaries that illuminate the work of this global peacemaker.
But the third reason I open the chapter with that quote is that I’d like to add a line to its message: And when you get to that summit, take a picture. As my colleague at Bazaarvoice Nishant Pithia did when he got to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro in 2010, and which you’ll see below.
From the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro in 2010. Photo: Nishant Pithia
Which takes me to the broad point I hope to make: that along with all the important lessons we’ve discussed here — from animating the soul of your company to bootstrapping vs. VC, from the role of network effects to the extension of your team through advisors, or from category creation to the essential role of values — the essence of leadership is insight. The founding of your company begins with an insight, your spotting of something that others have not seen. Your ability to compete turns on the insights you have into the marketplace, being the first or best with a product or innovation. Your leadership depends on your insights into your team, their strengths, their weaknesses, and most importantly their needs. Where do insights come from? They come largely from reflection, from listening to ourselves both as individuals and as organizations. And in turn, we need the means to record these reflections for them to become tools for decision-making and success. This is why you need to capture your amazing journey.
An important way to capture this is through writing. Many leaders in business and government keep journals. Not just the late Hammerskjöld mentioned above, but Barack Obama, Sir Richard Branson, and many others. After the allegorical Bible, the most widely read nonfiction book in history is the journal of a teenage victim of the Nazi Holocaust, who authored Anne Frank — The Diary of a Young Girl, which chronicled the oppression of Jews in the Netherlands and her two years in hiding before her discovery and death in a concentration camp at age 15.
“Asking questions that bring us back to what is most meaningful to us personally, as well as to what we believe is most important for society and the planet, deepens our sense of purpose..,” writes business philosopher Nancy J. Adler, in an essay I include on the Digital Companion. “Reflecting in your journal on inspirational words from world leaders or wisdom traditions can act as an antidote to superficiality and parochialism,” she further states.
Writing in other ways is equally a means of reflection. In addition to reading as many as 500 pages a day, Warren Buffett writes regularly, most notably in his letters to shareholders; he even personally writes his company’s annual reports. Many leaders now blog, including Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, Mark Cuban, and Brené Brown. I have been blogging my thoughts and reflections since 2012 at Lucky7, named in honor of my mother for helping me discover my passion at age 7 and nourishing it.
This book, in fact, grew out of this process of reflection. A thought on a Post-it, a remnant of a conversation, a note penciled in the margins of a book, an inspiration on a walk among the challenging hills that surround my home in Austin… These are the base elements of Lucky7. The blog, in turn, became the foundation for the first edition of this book, published on Medium.com for free. And that ebook evolved to become this set of reflections and learnings that you’ve been reading.
But what I want to advocate for here is a new way of reflecting as a team, or rather a way that was not always practical until now. This is, in our age of ubiquitous cell phone cameras, to capture your journey in pictures. For when you take photos along the way, something magical happens.
At data.world, we’ve had powerful camera phones since our beginning in 2015 — about the point these devices became truly ubiquitous worldwide. So, taking photos has never been easier. To help the process, I created our #history channel in Slack, and I’ve made sure to set the tone as CEO by sharing these in that ever-growing album. It was one of the first channels I created in our Slack, and it is really amazing to go back to the beginning of our journey and see the historical journal that has been captured since. And it’s not just photos. Among the gems is a screen capture of the texts I sent to data.world Co-founders Matt Laessig and Jon Loyens asking them if they would like to brainstorm new business ideas with me. Thankfully they said yes, and then Bryon Jacob, our fourth Co-founder, got involved pretty quickly after that and has been an amazing addition to our founding team, including coming up with the kernel of the idea we eventually ran with to start data.world. Some of these photos I’ve shared publicly, some you’ll find in the album in the center of this book, and our gallery was extremely helpful to mark the occasion when we came out of stealth and went live on July 11, 2016.
I emphasize chronicling with photographs because if you want to build a strong company culture, then you should care about the people in your company almost as much as you do about family. We discussed this and the importance of reflection back in Chapter 14, Seven Lessons Learned on the Journey from Founder to CEO, and I’ve thought deeply about how our work family has shown, and continues to show, how much we care about each other. I suspect most readers of this book, including you, are good in their personal lives at taking photos while they are on vacation. My wife, Debra, is particularly good at this and meticulously puts together photo albums after each vacation, which we only cherish more as time goes on. We want to document the very important time we spend together, and we know that our children will only be this age once. This is a natural practice for most families, especially those with young kids, as their appearance changes so much from year to year.
So why should it be different for companies? After all, you are on a very important journey together. Your company journey is your livelihood — it gives you the means of having other journeys, such as that vacation time with your family. I’ve often thought of Benjamin Franklin’s maxim that “time is money.” True enough, but the reverse can equally be true. Your livelihood enables time. Not just your life and special times with your family, it enables as well the pursuit of your passions, your journey to the top of Abraham Maslow’s famous “hierarchy of needs,” where self-actualization and esteem are to be found. The utility of money enables us to take more time to think about our purpose in life and to reflect upon the mark that we want to leave on the world. As entrepreneurs, you are doing something that many others may tell you is “impossible.” The entrepreneur’s journey is fundamentally no different than my colleague Nishant’s journey, which he undertook with a few brave souls from Bazaarvoice to raise money for an important cause. Of course, they took a lot of photos — it was the journey of a lifetime and they wanted to remember all of it. Shouldn’t it be the same for companies? Isn’t that a journey worth remembering? Brant Barton and I thought so, and we took a lot of photos along the way. So did great people like Oliver Wong, Tung Huynh, and Nishant of course. Brant and I owe a lot to those three for selflessly spending so much of their time at company events to take photos. And, as our CEO, I encouraged them to take more every chance I got, especially when we reached new milestones on the climb up that company-building mountain.
As I noted above, when you take these photos along the way, something magical happens. And it isn’t all that different from what happens when you come back from your family vacation and put together that all-important photo album. I’m sure you’ve had the same experience when you look back at your vacation and you remember it being even better than you thought it was when you were there. The magic is that you start to care about the journey more than you ever have. So carry this magic to your company and the entire team will model you in this regard. You will get a real sense of creating a legacy together. And as you achieve new milestones — as your “baby” (in this case the infant company) grows up into a “child” (the young company) and finally a “young adult” (the public company that Bazaarvoice became) — you have so many photos to look back on and remember “the way it was.” A note of caution, though. As the CEO, you cannot just reminisce — you also always need to be celebrating the best of the present and looking toward the future. The whole journey matters, not just the journey as an infant and child. You are always creating memories and for those that just joined your company, their journey is just beginning.
After we grew to around 500 people and eventually to 850 and beyond, the most popular optional presentation in Bazaarvoice’s history became the history presentation that Brant gave. It was a humble display, showing how we bought our first computers at Costco, worked in free office space with borrowed desks, and struggled to find our initial product-market fit — meaning the building of a product that people would love while avoiding the risk of taking down a customer website if our product failed to load. The room was always packed, standing-room only. The slideshow was full of photos, and many stories of the Bazaarvoice infant and child journey along the way. Why was it so packed? Because people that are on the journey with you want to have a sense of its origins. Where you start often leads to where you end up. And I believe there is an entrepreneur in all of us here in America, as I wrote about in Chapter 9, How, and Why, to Ask for Help.
So treat your company like you would your family. You don’t have to love it like you love your spouse or your children — that, frankly, isn’t the right way to look at it. Family is forever. But you should love it immensely and you should model the same practices you have as a family to nourish the soul of your company. A good best practice as the founder is to try to remember to take your camera — now easier than ever with high-quality cameras a standard feature of all mobile phones — out every day and take a few photos. And be explicit with everyone in your company about why you are doing so. Tell them that you want to remember this time in the company’s history forever. That you will cherish these memories, and you hope they do too. Let them know that the journey is what counts the most, and you will not take it for granted. That everything in life — money, fame, or whatever — is not in the same league as the journey. When you are much older and looking back at the life you lived and the people you worked with and helped, you’ll remember the journey the most.
Founders: Cherish the journey, respect it, and document it. Capture your insights, your essential intellectual capital, and use them to reflect as both leader and team. With journals, with diaries, with blogs, and most importantly with photographs. A picture is worth a thousand words.
“A good photograph is knowing where to stand.”
— Ansel Adams, environmentalist, and photographer